Napatech Receives $5 Million Venture Capital Funding

COPENHAGEN, Denmark and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 24 /PRNewswire/ --
Napatech today announced the investment of $5 million from Ferd Venture,
Northzone Ventures and DTU Innovation. Napatech is the leader in programmable
high speed Ethernet network adapters. The investment coincides with Napatech's
acquisition of the network adapter business of storage solution leader
Xyratex.
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"We are very pleased with the confidence in Napatech's business
opportunity shown by the investors, and I in particular welcome the new
investor Ferd Venture," says Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO, "The funding enables us
specifically to acquire the adapter business of Xyratex and to react
effectively to the demand we experience in the market."
Napatech's solutions enable OEM customers to scale network monitoring
appliances, traffic analysers and recorders, testers and security products to
the rapidly growing Ethernet speeds and traffic load. The solutions enable
many applications by off-loading CPU/memory and bus architectures.
"The network traffic is growing at a pace three times faster than the CPU
capacity. As more companies move to gigabit networks there will be an
increasing need for programmable network adapters to offload the CPU and
Napatech is a strong company in this market," says Bjorn Erik Reinseth,
partner in Ferd Venture.
"This dual transaction solidifies Napatech's position in the market to the
great advantage of the customers," says Gregers Kronborg, general partner in
Northzone Ventures, "The strategy to specialize in programmable network
adapter platforms that supports a multitude of OEM customers is being widely
accepted and leveraged."
Napatech's product portfolio includes a 1Gb and a 10Gb platform that offer
solutions for network management, traffic analysis and recording, security
applications and a toolbox enabling customers to implement their own
proprietary intellectual property on the network adapter.
The round was led by Ferd Venture. As Nordic early stage ICT investors
Ferd Venture and existing investor Northzone Ventures put emphasis on working
closely with the founders and management to develop the company. The existing
investor DTU Innovation, which is a fund related to the Danish Technical
University, also participated in the round.
Private investor, and formerly co-founder and COO of the Danish public
networking company Olicom, Kurt Nybroe-Nielsen will continue as chairman of
Napatech. Bjorn Erik Reinseth from Ferd Ventures will join the board. Gregers
Kronborg, formerly co-founder of Danish cable broadband start-up COCOM that
was acquired by Cisco in 1999, continues on the board as vice-chairman. Also
continuing on the board is co-founder and CTO of Napatech Jens Christophersen,
formerly lead architect with COCOM and Cisco. Finally, Erik Norup, former
director of marketing in Cisco will continue to serve on the board of
Napatech.
About Napatech
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Founded in 2003, Napatech produces programmable and intelligent Ethernet
adapters. The core idea is off-loading real-time/streaming traffic and payload
analysis and control applications traditionally implemented in software or
proprietary hardware. Napatech expects a huge growth in the demand for
intelligent and programmable adapters as Ethernet speeds increase. The current
PC architecture limits the amount of bandwidth that can be handled by the PCI
bus and CPU/memory. Napatech offers its products to OEM customers. Napatech
has marketing and R&D offices in Mountain View, California and Copenhagen,
Denmark. Napatech is a 2004 Tornado100 Winner. Napatech is funded by Northzone
Ventures, Ferd Venture, DTU-Innovation and a group of business angels with
vast experience within networking.
http://www.napatech.com
About Ferd Venture
Ferd Venture is part of Ferd, which is one of Norway's leading investment
companies. Ferd Venture primarily invests in Nordic technology-based companies
that are seeking capital for further commercialisation and growth, and which
have the potential to sustain long-term competitive market advantage. Ferd
Venture has a team of 6 investment professionals based out of offices in Oslo,
and has significant capital reserves available for new investments. The
current portfolio consist of 10 companies including Affitech, Bone Support,
Cinevation, Colibria, Forbrukerforsikring, Genkey, Marical, Mohive, Nacre and
Vensafe.
For further information, please visit www.ferdventure.no.
About Northzone
Northzone Ventures, the venture capital management company, was
established in 1996. Northzone Ventures has a team of 10 people and offices in
Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo. Northzone is actively engaged in about 20
Scandinavian technology companies. Current and past portfolio companies
include Pricerunner, Asetek, Enigma Semiconductor, Speakanet, Funcom,
Lastminute.com, Mamut, Nextgentel, Stepstone and Trolltech.
For further information, please visit www.northzone.com.
About DTU Innovation
DTU Innovation is a pre-seed venture company. DTU Innovation has 100 MDKK
under management. The funds are partly government money and partly venture
money from a group of the largest Danish companies.
For further information, please visit www.dtu-innovation.dk.
For additional information please contact:
Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe Ferd Venture, Norway
Henrik Brill Jensen, CEO Bjorn Erik Reinseth, Partner
+45 4596 1500 +47 990 22 000
hbj@napatech.comber@ferd.no
Northzone Ventures, Denmark
Gregers Kronborg, General Partner
+45 70 222 475
kronborg@northzone.com
(C) 2006 Napatech all rights reserved. Napatech is a trademark used under
license by Napatech A/S. All other logos, brand names and product names are
trademarks of their respective companies.
This release was issued on behalf of the above organization by
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